Students & Staff Organize against Portland Public School Board

PPS educators who remain in the district and are committed enough to their students to stand by them and show enough belief in them to center them above all else in their job, are genuine rare souls with the the guts and heart and strength of will to risk their own livelihood in order to combat the onslaught of corporate education agendas to protect the communities they serve. Even while working through the intensive stress and long hard hours, unbelievably understaffed, overworked and overwhelmed, stretched thin by impossibly massive class sizes, while not even getting paid a living wage to care for their own children or loved ones or their selves with. Still against all that, this special and rare breed of human being are saving lives and guiding our most vulnerable youth to better themselves in our cities declining school district.

Meanwhile they have to see upper administration continually somehow make gains and increases in their own salaries and throw away more public education funding and desperately needed resources on placing armed security guards in our children’s schools and increasing patrols of violent Portland Police Bureau officers in school zones, contributing more and more to the school to prison pipeline that they prop up to create those extra digits in their salaries. 

Now, we have seen the way PPS deals with voices of dissent from their women and POC staff. When these courageous educators who center their students interest and should be treated by admin as the pride of our district, speak out against this misappropriation of resources and harassment they are invalidated, gas lit, forced to endure verbal abuse, veiled threats and intimidation or outright retaliatory attacks against their careers and reputations. And even as these staff members are just barely keeping the district from a full collapse they aren’t allowed to have their voices heard. 

Bryan Chu is one of the most beloved classroom educators in the entire PPS district by the words and actions of the students he has advocated for and centered year in and year out in the classes he has taught. Teachers like Chu save lives of our community youth by way of the extra time, empathy, effort and care they show them. Students have fought for Chu tooth and nail for over a year with organized walk outs, student protests, direct action marches to the PPS district HQ, and have given countless written and spoken testimonials on his behalf. 

Now here we are witnessing again the same disturbing pattern of corrupt and transparent targeting of POC and femme or non-binary staff willing to speak out. PPS admin are appearing more everyday as the shield for the self serving interests of a medieval minded cannibal cult-like bureaucratic district administration who conduct themselves more like feudal era high lords imposing their brutal will and taxes on the ‘small folk peasant class’, then a governing body working in the interest of their students. The students they are paid with public tax dollars to serve and support.

As we have been anticipating, they are once again rolling out the guillotine to try and silence the voice of a brilliant POC educator who’s always had the courage to speak against them and their abuse and corruption and cuts to student services and staff. 

Since Chu will always tell it like it is and shine a light on the bullshit to call out the administration for their willful ignorance and inaction when they know full well that women and POC students and educators within their own classrooms and workforce, face a daily culture of sexual harassment, corruption, bullying, retaliation, and misappropriation of public funding. The board is flailing without control or conscience and using a single petty occurrence of using profanity once, in his own home, during an online union meeting  in 2021, as an excuse to invalidate decades of inspiring teaching experience and an unmatched ability to bring the best out of his classroom students year in and year out, and attempting to tear one of the most honest and beloved teachers in the district away from his students who have passionately and relentlessly advocated for him, just as he has for them through the decades as an educator and saved or greatly improved the lives of countless students in the Portland Public School district.